Our Eternity
by Professor Pang
Summary: Carlisle's and Esme's story, from the day she was turned.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: I've recently felt the need to write Carlisle/Esme, and this is what came up. I don't know if there will be a continue, but let's all hope so!**

**I'd kind of like to thanks both the Breaking Dawn part 2 movie and my very dear friend _EmmaLupinCutterCullenWho_ for making me see this ship in ways I didn't do before :P**

**I feel like I'm betraying the HP fandom, but seriously, can't we all just get along? Who cares if some people like Twilight and some doesn't? Let's stop the fandom wars.**

**Disclaimer: I don't know Twilight or any characters, they're all Stephenie Meyers.**

**Esme's POV.**

The pain finally faded away.

My senses were heightened. Even without opening my eyes I could sense that I was in a wooden house by the sound of someone moving around in the store under this one.

There was a wonderful smell swirling above me. I greedily drew it in – so _sweet_. I wanted to know what smelled so good. I opened my eyes.

I could see the smallest corn of dust in the furthest corner in the ceiling of the room. I moved my eyes in around but saw nothing but more ceiling, and turned my head to the left where the scent descended from.

It was like seeing the sun for the first time. Beautiful golden eyes staring down at me, filled with compassion and worry.

His hair was a golden blonde and laying perfectly smooth on his head; not a hair out of place.

His face and features was symmetric and so beautiful I could hardly describe them. Marked cheekbones, perfectly straight nose, flawlessly formed lips, a set and smooth jaw and such kind eyes.

I could remember him. I'd definitely seen him before.

_Carlisle Cullen._

The doctor who took care of me after I fell out of a tree when I was sixteen.

I remembered the pain of my leg breaking, but my body felt hard all over now. I felt insestructable, and I doubted I'd ever break anything again. I don't know what happened to me, but that's what it felt like.

I remembered Doctor Cullen ever so lightly touching my leg to detect the harm. I remembered the crush that emerged when I met him at sixteen, and I never forgot him through my failed marriage and childbirth.

Right.

I remembered my marriage to the husband my parents chose for me – Charles Evenson who beat me regurlarly. I left him when I became pregnant.

And the pregnancy ended it all. After my son died I flung myself off a cliff, wanting nothing more than to disappear from earth and be reunited with my son.

Then why was I here, clearly alive?

"Where am I?"

I flinched by the sound of my own voice. It wasn't like usual – it was a high, twittering version of it, which scared me. My hands instinctively flew to my throat. "What happened?"

Carlisle placed a hand on my arm, and I almost flinched away. I felt on my guard, like if someone touching me was a threat.

But Carlisle's hand was meant to sooth me. I could feel it.

I decided to sit up – no point in laying down like a handicap when I felt able to knock the whole house down.

In the moment I decided so, in a flash, I was already sitting.

This scared me more than anything.

I stared at Carlisle, who had let his hand fall to his lap when I moved, with big eyes. "Carlisle?"

His eyes lightened up a bit. "Esme."

I could hear footsteps approaching the room, and my head whipped in the direction of them. Why was I so on guard? I'd never been like this before.

A young man stepped into the room, with the same golden eyes and pale skin as Carlisle. His hair had the colour of bronze and he looked at me curiously.

Carlisle called my attention back to him. "Esme, do you remember what happened to you before you woke up here?"

Despite my overwhelming desire to know why I was here, I concentrated to do as he said. "I jumped off a cliff. I know I hit the ground, I remember the pain. Then... I thougth I was going to die, and then this terrible pain started, and I was sure I'd come to hell."

Carlisle smiled knowingly. "You're not in hell," he said, but the bronze-haired man snorted.

"Where am I, then?" I asked, more pointedly than I'd intentioned it to sound.

Carlisle's smile faded. "Some wanderers found you by the cliff, broken and still. They took you to the hospital, and the doctors decided that you were dead and sent you off to the morgue-house. You'd only been there for a little while when I got there, and I could hear your heart beating, very weakly. I had two choices – either to let you die there or to save you, in a damned way, which I didn't know if you would ever have wanted for yourself. But as I remembered the girl with the broken leg, and how happy she had been, and then the woman she'd become, and the things she must have been through to make her jump off a cliff, and decided that I wanted to give her a second chance to live, no matter how damned that life was."

I opened my mouth slowly, and asked, "What is this 'damned way' of saving me? What is it I've become?" Second by second I became more and more aware of the changes in me. I was cold and hard, hard as stone. I was a whole lot paler than before, like Carlisle and the other man in the room. My sense of smell, hearing, taste and sight, and worst of all; _my heart wasn't beating_.

His face looked pained. "I turned you into a vampire."

My first impulse was to laugh. Vampires didn't exist. But, as I thought about it, Carlisle didn't exactly seem human. And what had I heard about vampires – pale as snow, and so beautiful no human could resist them? That description certainly fit Carlisle.

The bronze-haired man snorted again.

But what about the rest? The garlic, sleeping in coffins during the day because the sun would kill them and turning into a bat at will?

The snorting man now let out a small laugh. I wondered what was so funny.

I turned my head to look at Carlisle. "Is that what this is? I'm a vampire?"

His eyes seemed to darken. "Yes."

"Is that what _you_ are?"

"Yes."

"So you bit me to let me live."

"Yes."

"What does this mean? What does being a vampire mean?"

"It means you're immortal. You can live forever. You're indestructable and so strong and fast no one will ever be able to outrun or beat you."

"What about garlic and bats? Coffins? The sun?"

He laughed a little. "Myth. I've never sensed anything special about garlic, I'm not able to change form, the sun isn't dangerious but nothing to show a human, and I never sleep."

"You _never sleep_?"

"Never."

Hm.

"What is it that happens in the sun?"

He smiled. "You'll have to see for yourself someday.

The most feared question reached my mind. "What do we... feed?"

Carlisle once again looked pained. "Most vampires feed on human blood. But we don't," he quickly added as he saw my horrified expression, "We feed on animal blood. It's hard to resist humans once you smell them – it drives most of us wild with thirst – but we've learnt to resist it."

I swallowed. "So if I... smell... a human, I probably will kill him or her?"

"Not for sure. If you're able to control yourself, you don't have to."

I sighed and looked out the window in the room, where I could see a misty forest. I didn't know what to think. Having to accept that I've become a vampire was bearable, but having to kill humans? Destroy hundreds of people's lives because I was thirsty?

"Amazing," I heard the second man murmur.

Carlisle guestured towards him. "Esme, this is Edward, my son in all but blood. I bit him as well. He can read minds, and I suppose that's why he's been laughing."

"At me?" I asked, a bit worried. He could read minds? How was that possible?

Edward smiled. "Partly, but because of Carlisle as well. And to answer your question – some of us bring our strongest traits as humans to our second life. I must have been a person-reader even back then."

Carlisle interrupted. "May I get to know what's 'amazing'?"

Edward threw another glance at me before looking at him. "She's seeing this whole thing so differently from how I did. She's OK with becoming a vampire, but she's the most worried about killing and destroying people's lives. She's quite a bit like you, actually."

I looked at Edward curiously. How had he thought in the beginning?

Edward looked back at me. "I thought I could do nothing about the killing, despite what Carlisle told me. I didn't think there was any way to go against our nature. But you're already set on doing it."

"She hasn't smelled anything yet," Carlisle reminded him. "Her mind probably won't be as set as soon as she smells a human."

The burn in my throat, that had been dull but present ever since I woke up, slowly started becoming more unbearable.

"As a matter of fact," Edward said, "I'm going out to check the woods for humans so she can hunt." And in a flash, he was gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: Thanks to every single one of you who reviewed! I love you all. And I'm sorry this isn't quite as long as the last one, but I'll try to make up for that in the upcoming chapters. I'm working on a third in Edward's POV, how does that sound?**

I turned to Carlisle, frightened. "Hunt? How?"

His lips twitched into a small smile. "Don't worry. It will come to you naturally."

I took an uneccessary breath to prepare myself. "Will you show me?"

He smiled once more. "Of course."

That moment, Edward returned. "It's safe."

"Thank you, Edward," Carlisle said and calmly guestured for me to follow him out of the room. We started walking, in human speed, down the stairs, and I followed, out the door and into the forest.

The forest brought on a lot more impressions – thousands of smells, beautiful sights and new sounds. I stood perfectly still, taking it all in, until Carlisle gently touched my arm. "Coming?"

We set off – and I was amazed by the speed. How fast we could move! And how gracefully! If I'd been human I would've been scared by the break-neck speed, afraid of running into something, but this was so easy, so natural, it truly felt like I was made to do it.

Of course that might be the case – vampires were predators, after all.

I suddenly smelled something that made the ache in my throat burn hotter. I stopped dead in my tracks and stood still for about a hundred of a second, and then set off after it.

While following the smell through the forest I became gradually less aware of myself, and gradually more aware of the fact that I was a predator hunting for my prey. I ducked under low hanging branches and jumped over small rivers, tirelessly running towards the delicious smell.

My prey turned out to be a deer, an innocent Bambi drinking water from a puddle. A part of me screamed at me not to kill it; it was just a poor, innocent deer who'd done nothing wrong. But the new, predator part, didn't care, and flew to the deer, tackled it and bit into its neck. The meat and bone was like butter, and then I reached the pulse of blood.

What a wonderful thing. Human food was nothing, _nothing_, compared to this. So sweet, so hot, so satisfying – and so quickly ended. I let go of the limp body and sniffed in the air for something new, more blood to satisfy the vampire I was.

The strong scent of a cougar hit me full in the face, and I was off in milliseconds. I followed the scent up a tree, easily jumping from branch to branch, barely thinking about it, and then I saw the cougar.

It was a male, settled on a branch, looking down at an elk by the river. I silently crept towards him, and he suddenly turned around to growl at me.

I hissed back, baring my teeth and letting out the most guttural sound I'd ever heard from myself, and ignored his fighting claws trying to risp my stone-hard skin as I closed my hand around his neck and let my teeth sink into it.

His blood tasted even better than the deer's. Sweeter, hotter, _more_ satisfying.

When I was finished, I drained the elk as well.

After all three animals, I felt positively filled. The ache was almost gone in my throat. I turned around, looking for Carlisle.

He was standing a few yards away, leaning against a tree with a smile on his face.

"See?" He let out a small laugh. "I told you it would come naturally."

I laughed with him. "You sure did." Now, it seemed ridiculous that I had asked him to show me something so easy and natural.

I felt happy I could kill animals, like this, instead of humans – but I still felt bad for the deer, cougar and elk I'd killed. They'd done nothing to deserve being killed by a vicious vampire.

I heard a laugh, and I whipped my head around to see Edward swiftly walking towards us between the trees. His eyes was sparkling with mirth, and a smile was playing on his lips. I could smell that he'd been hunting as well.

Carlisle turned his warm gaze from me to Edward. "Laughing at me again, are you?" He sounded happy.

Edward shook his head. "It's Esme. She feels bad for the _animals_. She thinks that they have done nothing to deserve being killed by a vicious vampire."

Carlisle looked at me again, the smile even warmer now.

I smiled back. I had a feeling that we would all get along as well as I hoped.

**R&R please!**


	3. Chapter 3

**Edward's POV**

As we walked back to the house in human speed, Esme's thoughts, and the conversation, were centered around this new life and what it would mean. In her earlier life the most important thing you'd ever need had been money, money for food to eat and for a place to live. But she didn't need money any more, and even if we did have a home we actually didn't need one. She wondered what we did all day long – cleaning only taking a minute, never having to cook...

Carlisle answered her questions patiently, in his thoughts admiring her every little move. She was very in-control for a newborn. He was amazed by her emphaty, how she could accept becoming a vampire but felt bad for killing a deer.

I let out a barely hearable laugh – as Carlisle was used to never hiding anything from me, and thought about her freely, Esme was trying to think about Carlisle as little as possible, thinking I was going to tell him about how "extraordinary" she thought he was. Especially now, as he was telling her about how he became a vampire, she was more amazed than ever. As Carlisle finished the story of how he came to feed on animals, they were both quiet for a while.

I listened to Esme's impressions. She was amazed by the sights the woods offered – how things such as cobwebs could be so beautiful with these new eyes. She was amazed by how she could hear raindrops from a tree hit a puddle of water beneath it miles away. Her face showed these emotions – a brilliant smile was on her lips and her red eyes didn't look quite so bad with such wonder shining out of them.

She started asking more questions about being a vampire, and as Carlisle patiently answered them, his thoughts were centered around her. She had always been present in his thoughts at times, ever since I met him, but he'd always known he could never have her, being a vampire. Now she was here, with him, and he was intoxicated. He had no idea why he was so fascinated by her in the first place – when he first met her she'd only been a normal human girl, not especially pretty or in anybody's eyes in any way special at all, except in his. He was mesmerized by her even then, by her smell and the way she acted. So gentle, so caring.

_There are clear similarities in their behaviour_, I thought dryly.

Esme were quite taken by him as well, and her eyes would constantly fluttered to him and away. She felt kind of embarassed – she had always seen her fondness of him as a silly teenage crush she never quite let go of – yet here she was, ten years later, with him telling her about vampires and she was every bit as nervous and jittery as she'd been the first time she met him. Except now she could control it.

I tried hard to stifle a laugh. Carlisle, my creator, my father, the always sure and confident one, the one who always knew what to do – I had never once heard his thoughts so dissolved and in such a mess. Just like hers. He thought himself ridiculous for it and tried to ignore it. Of course, he knew what this was, even though he wouldn't admit it in his thoughts. He had never forgot about her since he first saw her when she was sixteen. But he wasn't one to rush into things.

And neither was Esme, I knew, but she wasn't quite onto the same track as Carlisle yet. Despite how safe she felt with him, ghosts of her past was – already – haunting her, and surrounded by men she felt she needed to protect herself.

Her thoughts disclosed how disappointed she was – during the explination of this new life, she had hoped that her past fears would have disappeared with her humanity.

I put a hand on her shoulder carefully. "It will take a while, Esme, but it will pass."

She instinctively snarled by me touching her, but then realised what she was doing and instantly stopped, her thoughts worried about whether she'd hurt my feelings. I tried hard not to laugh again.

**AN: I'm sorry this is so short, but I thought it'd be better if I actually updated than struggled with the lenght and kept you waiting even longer.**

**I feel like this was a bit messed up, which is very possible considering that I wrote it on different times and then tied it all up in the end. Tell me what you thought!**

**R&R!**


	4. Chapter 4

Carlisle and Edward had encouraged me to get a hobby, instead of restlessly walking around the house all day. Cleaning the house, which neither of them seemed to usually care about, was fixed in minutes and eventually I decided that they were right.

"Edward?" I called casually. Edward and I were alone – after a few weeks Carlisle thought that it was safe to leave for his work, since I'd been unusually calm for a newborn vampire so far, even if that may be because I hadn't smelled a single drop of human blood yet.

The soft music of the piano silenced suddenly as his fingers abruptly left the keys. He was opposite to me in an instant. "Esme?"

I fidgeted with my fingers – a human habit. "I've been thinking of what you and Carlisle's been telling me..."

He read my thoughts. "Of course. I can make sure you'll get all the things you'll need ready tomorrow."

"Edward, I don't want you to buy a lot of new things for me – "

He interrupted me. "It's not my money, it's Carlisle's, and believe me, he doesn't mind. Money isn't worth anything to him, and he'll be very happy to spend them on an interest of yours. You should have seen him when I told him I wanted to have a piano."

Knowing my every single thought, Edward knew just what to say to shut me up.

The next day when Carlisle came home from work, he brought a staflee, canvases, oil-paint, water colours, coal-pens, brushes, empty sheets of paper, every tool you could possibly think of for any kind of drawing or painting.

"Carlisle," I said, not quite sure of what I wanted to tell him. "This... it's _way_ too much. When Edward told me you could get _the things I needed_ I didn't think he meant a whole painting-store."

A grin blessed his lips, making it harder for me to actually try and reason with him. "Well... you'll run out of things eventually. I'm just prolonging my next shopping trip."

I rolled my eyes. "Still, I don't want you to spend all this money on me. A sketchbook and pens would have been enough."

"But not as fun."

I raised an eyebrow. "Since when do you draw? Or paint?"

He raised his own eyebrow back at me. "I don't. But I can tell what's fun, and I know that having a bit of variation is always a more fun than not."

He was right, of course. "That doesn't change the fact that you spent about a month's worth of salary on _me_." Not that it wasn't flattering, but it was unecessary... and slightly embarassing.

He took a step closer to me. "Esme," he started, and I shuddered. Not visibly, thank God. "I don't _mind_. I love the fact that I have someone to spend money on except myself."

_That_ brought me down more than anything – that he'd been so lonely before, and knowing him, probably felt like he _needed_ to give both me and Edward things. After being alone for two centuries, feeling liked must be foreign.

My face softened dramatically, and suddenly I was embracing him.

_Damn those newborn impulses_.

I withdrew quicker than I wanted to. I wanted to say something like _I don't know why I did that_, but first, that wouldn't really help in making him feel liked, and second, I _did_ know. So I settled for "Thank you."

He smiled back at me, looking slightly taken aback but hiding it well. I grinned and skipped off, grabbing a sheet of paper, a coal–pen and running outside to do a sketch of the tree in the backyard. I'd been dying to since I first saw it.

After an hour, I heard someone approaching me from behind. The piano was still playing inside, so it must be Carlisle. I turned around and smiled at him. "Hi."

"Hi," he said, nodded and sat down beside me in the grass. "How is it going?"

I looked down at the sketch. "I had a bit of a surprise when I realised I can't smother the coal out anymore. Human fingers works better than..." I tapped my own fingers thoughtfully. "Sticks of stone?"

He chuckled brightly. "Still making do, though, I see?"

I followed his eyes down onto the ground beside us and chuckled as well. I had used a damp edge of my dress to smother the coal out into the shapes I wanted, and the it was spotted with black. "Yes, it seems like I am."

"I love that," he mused. "How you're so creative, not only with the painting."

_Vampire-blush-time_.

"Thank you."

He smiled at me again and I smiled back.

I could've sworn I heard an irritated sigh from the piano.

**AN: I'm so very sorry for the horribly long time I've been gone for... I didn't mean to, but I'm back now, not necessarily at full force but inspired all the same. **

**Just saying, so it won't seem like I'm neglecting it, I'm not going to focus on how Esme's going through the loss of her son at the moment. I might do something about it in later chapters, but right now I want to focus on some other things. You may misunderstand that any way you like, and please tell me about it ;)**


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